Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(76)
I once sat on a terrace overlooking Hallam Lake, a small nature preserve near the Institute, with one of the visitors who had risen high in the world. It was late in the afternoon. The lake was silvery. Swallows darted in the air. Over the leafy town fell a perfect, clear light.
“Let’s go in,” he said.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nature upsets me,” he said.
The last concerts are at the end of August. Unlike the winter, summer drifts slowly to an end. There are still white-clad figures on the tennis courts, and on the bulletin board outside a restaurant called The Shaft flutter slips of paper placed by people urgently seeking housing or selling climbing boots and skis, as well as by those making proposals of a more striking nature:
Two girls heading to Minneapolis end of August. Need ride. Will trade ass for gas.
The leaves begin to turn. The sky is a deeper blue. The tree for which the town is named (Aspen was originally called Ute City) has small, shimmering leaves and a whitish trunk like a birch. In some places it is called the trembling poplar. Chaucer and Pliny wrote of it, and there is a legend that the original Cross was made of it. The bark was once used as medicine. About the first week in October, the vast groves on the mountainsides become gold overnight. In a last sweep of color, the summer is gone.
America’s oldest cities date back only to the seventeenth century, and some of the largest merely to the nineteenth. An entire growth—and in some instances decline—has taken place in the wink of an eye. In less than a century, Aspen already has a buried past: an old town covered by a new one, and beneath that still another layer—there are mining tunnels everywhere under the present city, abandoned vessels of bewildering scale. A little way up Ajax is the entrance to the old Durant mine. You can still enter and walk into the chilly depths of another realm, into absolute darkness where shafts soar toward an unknown surface and tunnel walls have collapsed to reveal galleries large enough for the Jerome Hotel to disappear in. All this, all the lives devoted to it and the wealth it brought forth, is forgotten. Beneath the modern town is a Homeric ruin, and though it is invisible, it has an influence and provides a quality that other places do not have: the sense of having been built on something other than the pursuit of pleasure—on something of consequence. Without this submerged order, Aspen would be like Snowbird or Vail, both of which are pleasant but made-up. They lack the authenticity that Aspen, for all its foolishness, still possesses.
Yet the town seems to have rapidly traveled the path that leads, in the case of resorts, from discovery by an adventurous few to full-fledged ownership by the rich and prosperous. Some of the early people were well-off, but they were part of the jaunty days of an unconventional era. A number of them, not much older-looking, are still around thirty years later, burnished by the sun and preserved by years of fresh air. But just as there are two theaters, the one the audience sees and the one backstage, so there are two Aspens—the one in plain sight and the invisible one withheld from the visitor. What happened over the years was that certain members of the original cast, far from being content with the beauty of an ideal life, started buying up the theater. When the great land boom began in the early ’70s, the ambitious had stockpiled real estate, and the dreamers, tinkerers, and exiles drifted away to Santa Barbara or New Mexico.
From glorious, primitive winters and shared communal joy, Aspen turned into real-estate offices and boutiques. Dogs once sat serenely in the middle of the street. Now they are on leashes, and the hip young cops drive blue Saabs. Not that there is crime here. One can sleep sweetly and in peace. A certain amount of thievery and housebreaking goes on, of course, unlike the days when doors were never locked. But there are virtually no crimes against the person; the last murder occurred five years ago and was attributed to a maniac, Theodore Bundy. Bundy is alleged to have killed a young woman in Snowmass, a satellite resort about ten miles from Aspen, and to have dumped her naked body in the snow along a road. The case was never tried, Bundy having first thrilled the town by jumping from the second-story window of the courthouse—he had been left unguarded to look something up in the legal library—and disappearing on the streets in broad daylight. The radio warned people to lock their doors and windows, but as it turned out, the fugitive had no interest in disturbing anyone and wandered about miserably in the woods for several days before he was recaptured trying to leave the valley in a stolen car. On his second escape attempt, he fled to Florida, where he was tried and convicted for a series of murders he committed there.
The county sheriff, Dick Kienast, was embarrassed by the escapes but regained his dignity among the locals by taking a strong stand against the ways in which drug laws are enforced. His position, reported with zeal by the national press, was that most drug use, at least in Aspen, takes place in homes. He came down on the side of privacy, refusing to cooperate with federal agencies and even facing a grand jury as a result.
There are reasons to believe that a significant amount of cocaine—or Bolivian marching powder, as it is affectionately called in Aspen—is passed around. There is a general understanding within sophisticated circles in cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Dallas that Aspen is a place where good times can be had, in the modern sense of the term.
Jane Smith and Susan Olsen own a shop called Heaven next to the ancient brick building that houses the Isis, Aspen’s oldest movie house. They are right out of an updated Gentlemen Prefer Blondes—sassy, warm-blooded, and wise. In Heaven one can find chic clothes, unusual and expensive: jackets woven from silk and Samoyed hair, suede chaps as erotic as spike-heeled shoes, leather belts for $250, skimpy tops and fur coats of coyote or Japanese raccoon.